The Other Shoe

Created by Lagmonkey, in response to a suggestion by Rachel Lucas.

I was first exposed to Michael Moore when Suzanne screened Roger and Me for me a few years ago. It was one of those rare instances where Suzanne and I disagreed about something. She liked the film and thought Michael Moore had something goin' on. I told her I thought he was a phony.

Sometime last fall, we came across Moore being interviewed on tv. Suzanne looked at me and said, "Well, you sure called that one".

I guess I did at that. Here's an observation from Christopher Hitchens:

"Speaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well," Hitchens said, "it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities."

Indeed. Jim Nolan, writing in The Australian, has this to say about Moore's work:

Moore has cleverly set the stage for the propaganda offensive by suggesting that the distribution of his "documentary" has been sabotaged by Disney – a blatant lie uncritically now picked up by our local media. Moore has been one of the most prominent beneficiaries of what Roger Simon – the Hollywood screenwriter, novelist and blogger – has coined "the politics of the last five minutes".

Moore's Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine has, by definition, dropped off the radar of the "politics of the last five minutes" – but those of us with some memory left still recall those ominous pictures of the US bombers taking off in the Kosovo war in 1999. The dark implication was that the Boeing corporation – spookily nearby the Columbine massacre school – was, as the destructive representatives of US imperialism, all of a piece with those schoolboy mass murderers.

Moore's "documentary" didn't show that the Boeing factory near Columbine made weather satellites, not missiles. Nor did he take the trouble to explain that the Kosovo intervention was concerned with the rather more grown-up task of the prevention of genocide in the former Yugoslavia. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton courageously pre-empted the UN Security Council which was paralysed in the face of genocide – a familiar pose for that body. Does Moore stop to explain any of this? This was the awful truth that would have exposed Moore's message for the fraud that it was.

Every age has its prominent buffoon, a person admired in their time for reasons later generations shake their heads at in wonder, mystified that anyone could have taken seriously such an obvious jackass.

Michael Moore is our age's jackass, our Father Coughlin, our Joe McCarthy and our Curly Joe DeRita all rolled into one.

Blecch. 

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this